Our team has worked on a lot of different avenues for communicating who we are and what we are doing. We have largely focused on going out to the world and telling them how awesome biotechnology and synthetic biology can be. We have visited large events in our local area, we have shared our progress on social media and we have gone out and educated 9th graders on the wonders of biotechnology. Last but not least, we have worked on starting a brand new iGEM team for high school students.

Ecovative (Integrated Human Practices)

An important part of our project is making bricks out of fungi and since we are not the first to take this approach, we contacted Ecovative Design. They are the leading commercial manufacturer of fungal materials and we wanted to get their input on which features they could see us targeting for our project.

One of the suggestions from Ecovative was to integrate color changes into the mycelium, either in the form of chromoproteins or pigments, as this could be a huge market. Therefore, we started on assembling a chromoprotein cassette for insertion into the filamentous fungi. We have also assembled a melanin producing cassette which could give the material a darker look. All of these efforts could be attractive in the home decor market.
Secondly, if we could control the branching pattern or the cell wall thickness, it could be a huge leap in the structural abilities of the end products. We researched the possibilities and found the genes Gfa, which controls the synthesis of the cell wall (?) and ScGP-A, which controls the hydrophobins in S. commune. In addition to these genes, we modeled the growth on fungal mycelium and its branching pattern.

In parallel to working with the genetics of the fungal engineering, we also tackled the process of protoplasting and transforming filamentous fungi. Ecovative shared their protoplasting protocol with us [link to protocol] and we got to work on implementing the protocol.
During our experimentation, we tried to optimize the protocol by substituting an expensive reagent with a more affordable one. We used higher concentrations of glucanex than originally in the protocol and different digestion times instead following the protocol with their digestion times and concentration of driselase (and got results that were very alike. This means that we can save money in the process and potentially increase the profitability of Ecovative Design.)